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Professor Herman's New Book!

Sept. 27 - JUST RELEASED!

Daniel J. Herman, RIM COUNTRY EXODUS: A STORY OF CONQUEST, RENEWAL, AND RACE IN THE MAKING (University of Arizona Press, 2012).

The latest book by CWU's very own Professor Daniel Herman has just been released by the University of Arizona Press! The book, which advances our understanding of race and the formation of the West, is not only informative and well-written but it also contains many beautiful and never before published photographs from Arizona's pioneer era! Check it out.

Rim Country Exodustell the story of Apaches and Yavapais who were conquered and removed from their territories in the 1870s, then returned in the 1890s and early 1900s. In addition to telling the epic story of an exodus, the book examines how Indians became integrated into a white-dominated economy and society in the early twentieth century. Herman further shows that Indians and settlers quickly developed protocols for friendly interaction. At the same time, settlers used Jim Crow-style legislation to raise a wall of caste. In this milieu, settlers played the part of benevolent paternalists; Indians played the role of grateful minions and employees. Indians initially used this to their advantage--by manipulating paternalist sympathies, they achieved a measure of cultural freedom. Ultimately, however, they sought respect. While some took control of their own reservation governments, others used their art, their athleticism, and even their spiritual ceremonies to teach whites who they were. Though the tourist exchange was in some ways limiting, it gave Indians the ability to make whites see them as something more than savages. The result was race remade. The racial legacy of white-Indian relations in the early twentieth-century West is a legacy that we live with today.